MSI have had a 'warranty void if removed' sticker under their machines for years. Check before you buy as it can make upgrading painful. Forget about spindle drives, get a smaller SSD and just use an external drive if you have to. Loading a spindle drive just chews power, slows everything down, and makes noise and heat. They are the suck. Higher res screens require more powerful GFX cards due to the higher resolution. Think carefully about the 4k screen if you're only getting a low end GPU. Get a low latency wireless network card that supports the highest wireless range you can get. There's no point limiting your new machine to last years bandwidth. Think about a game controller to save your keyboard from being mashed. Replacing a laptop keyboard = expensive. Buy a decent mouse as well, SteelSeries and Razor make some great units. Lastly, think about the life cycle of your laptop : they do not last forever so work out when you'll likely want/need to sell it and buy a new one. You want to do that while it's still worth something. You also don't want to be stuck with a high end laptop thats out of warranty which developes a problem. Selling it while it's still valuable means your new machine costs less.

For proper functioning of GPU, it is essential to have VRAM of their own. This is beneficial in storing different frames, textures and other required properties for getting frames for the monitor. Finding out how much you require may be tricky. Hence, it is better to go for a laptop with as much VRAM as possible. You can buy a laptop with 3-4 VRAM. If you have reduced budget, you can opt for 2 GB VRAM. You, however, need to ensure that the resolution of the gaming laptop is 1080P.
If you can’t spend more than $1,000 but still want a laptop that can play games, get the Lenovo Legion Y530. It won’t play new games as well for as long as our top pick, but it keeps cool and has a bright screen, a comfortable keyboard, and a responsive trackpad. The Y530 is also about a pound lighter and significantly more compact than the Dell G7 and G5, but it’s more of a pain to upgrade yourself.
Although priced slightly higher than $500, the Aspire E 15 E5-575G-57D4 has earned our top pick in the budget gaming category thanks to its dedicated NVIDIA GeForce 940MX graphics card which offers more than twice the performance of competing laptops with only integrated graphics units. The Aspire E 15 will run titles such as Overwatch, Battlefield 1 and Titanfall 2 on low to medium settings with graphics performance more than double than competing integrated graphics based laptops below.
The world’s most advanced display technology can currently be found on the Alienware 13″ which is equipped with an OLED display! OLED technology is capable of displaying brilliant colors, reproducing 220% of the sRGB spectrum, and offering good luminosity. Unfortunately, due to its high cost, this technology has not yet been widely implemented by manufacturers.
Games are powered by the laptop's GeForce GT 940M GPU (2GB dedicated video memory), paired with 8GB DDR3L 1600 MHz RAM. It's a smart combination for this price class, capable of playing most games flawlessly. Besides the gaming performance this laptop made it to this top list because of its many additional features. We like the large 1TB storage which is very future proof. Additionally, ASUS packed this laptop with lots of connectivity: You get ultra-fast 802.11AC Wi-Fi, two USB 3.0 and one USB 2.0 ports, Bluetooth 4.0, plus HDMI and VGA ports. It's great to have such an abundance of ports.
But if you’re shopping for a gaming laptop, you’re probably more concerned with the graphics card, and the one found here is Nvidia’s GeForce MX150, a true testament to the capabilities of the Pascal architecture. It is almost twice as powerful as the previous-generation Maxwell-based mobile GPUs and leaves Intel’s integrated graphics solutions in the dust.

Laptops have become indispensable nowadays and have become an integral part of almost everyone’s life. Apart from being used for work, there are laptops which are made specifically for gaming. Gaming laptops are high performance computers and deliver amazing visuals that are needed to effectively run your games and enjoy them to the fullest extent. The laptops produced nowadays are powerful enough to run high-end games seamlessly. When it comes to gaming laptops, popular brands such as Alienware, Acer, HP, Dell, Lenovo, and MSI rule the roost.

After picking our hardware criteria (see above), we scoured the websites of major gaming-laptop manufacturers like Alienware, MSI, Asus, Razer, Samsung, Acer, HP, and Lenovo, and we browsed boutiques like Xotic PC, iBuyPower, Clevo, iBuypower, Origin PC, Digital Storm, and others. Then we put together a list of the laptops that fit our requirements and have positive reviews from trusted sources like CNET, AnandTech, Engadget, Laptop Mag, PCMag, and Notebookcheck, and eliminated those that didn’t.
Nailing down a high-quality mouse sensor is tricky without getting hands-on time with a given mouse. The two key sensor types are "optical" and "laser" sensors, but you can't apply absolutes when judging them. Your best bet is to try out a mouse in person, or to rely on formal reviews like ours, as well as online forums, for the skinny on how a mouse feels in specific play situations.
It is powered by an AMD Ryzen 5 quad-core processor clocked at 2.0 GHz and is paired with a 8GB of RAM. Storage department is handled by a massive 1TB of HDD which offers ample space to store all your games and other data. It doesn’t have a backlit enabled keyboard, but it does come with dedicated number pad and generously-spaced keys for comfortable typing experience.
John is PCMag's executive editor for hardware. A veteran of the popular tech site and magazine Computer Shopper from 1993 to 2017, he has covered just about every kind of computer gear—from the 386SX to 18-core processors—in his long tenure as an editor, a writer, and an advice columnist. He served as Computer Shopper’s editor in chief from 2008 to... See Full Bio
Doorbuster Deal Starting 5AM PST. Alienware has the Alienware 15 Intel Core i7-8750H Six-Core 15.6" 60Hz NVIDIA G-SYNC 1080p Gaming Laptop w/ NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 OC 8GB GDDR5 Graphics for a low $1,499.99 Free Shipping (exp soon). This laptop is normally on sale for $1750, so you're getting extra $250 off. Note: Select free upgrade to 15.6" FHD (1920 x 1080) 60Hz IPS Display NVIDIA G-SYNC Enabled before adding product to cart.
Though, as with most budget laptops, you will get a slower 5400rpm hard drive. However, seeing as more and more of us are moving over to digital copies of our games it makes sense to remove the DVD drive and replace it with a HDD caddy and a good SDD. This will allow you to reap all the major benefits that an SSD offers for gaming and day-to-day use.
Dell recently phased out its entry-level gaming-laptop series in favor of something more exciting and powerful. Meet the G7 15. Visually, the G7 15 is cut from a different cloth than either the Inspiron or the Alienware brands, giving the laptop an identity of its own. And it offers solid overall performance for all your multitasking needs. But more importantly, thanks to its Max-Q GTX 1060, you can expect good frame rates on AAA titles on medium to high settings.